Hoisted From Comments

Bob B

May 23, 2007

I don’t think we should let this moment pass without noting too the connection of Senator Prescott Bush with the rise of the Nazis:
“The president of the Florida Holocaust Museum said Saturday that George W. Bush’s grandfather derived a portion of his personal fortune through his affiliation with a Nazi-controlled bank.
“John Loftus, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Nazi War Crimes Unit, said his research found that Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a principal in the Union Banking Corp. in Manhattan in the late 1930s and the 1940s. Leading Nazi industrialists secretly owned the bank at that time, Loftus said, and were moving money into it through a second bank in Holland even after the United States declared war on Germany.
“The bank was liquidated in 1951, Loftus said, and Bush’s grandfather and great-grandfather received $1.5 million from the bank as part of that dissolution.
“‘That’s where the Bush family fortune came from: It came from the Third Reich,’ Loftus said.Loftus made his remarks during a speech as part of the Sarasota Reading Festival. The co-author of Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, The Nazis and the Swiss Banks, Loftus documented the Swiss bank accounts that harbored funds confiscated from Holocaust victims and the participation of Italian priests in smuggling Nazi war criminals to safe haven in Canada, Central and South America and the United States after the war. . . ”
http://www.unknownnews.net/bush1941.html
http://fleshingoutskullandbones.com/P.Bush-Union_Banking/P.Bush-Union_Banking.html
And, of course, we shouldn’t overlook that morale boosting speech in 1940 of Joe Kennedy, the US ambassador to Britain and father of JFK who later became the 35th President of the United States:
” . . the most famous being his interview with Joseph P. Kennedy, then U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s (Great Britain), in which his defeatist views toward the coming war were exposed.
“The story led the Sunday paper on November 10, 1940, at a time when Nazi troops occupied Poland, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and France, and German bombs were falling on London and other British cities. The headline read: ‘Kennedy Says Democracy All Done,’ and the story began with these words: ‘Joseph P. Kennedy was sitting in his shirtsleeves eating apple pie and American cheese in his room at the Ritz-Carlton. His suspenders hung around his hips.’
“In the interview, Kennedy was reactionary toward Europe and isolationist and defeatist about the war with Germany. One explosive quote in a long and garrulous performance ended Kennedy’s hope for a political career: ‘Democracy is finished in England. It may be here.’”
http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/06-2NRsummer/p115-0602-doyle.html

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Jim

May 23, 2007

Just so I’m clear, Tim: you’re *proud* of equating NHS workers to Nazis on the basis of a warmed-over press-release from a pressure group, yes?
Tim adds: Just so we’re clear on this, you think it’s a good idea, one brimming with good liberal consequences, to create a database of those who are gay?
What next? Religious affiliations? Race?

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dearieme

May 23, 2007

“even after the United States declared war on Germany”; which we must all remember occurred AFTER Germany declared war on the United States.

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Kay Tie

May 23, 2007

“What next? Religious affiliations? Race?”
Ah. That would be the 2011 census.

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Bob B

May 23, 2007

“‘even after the United States declared war on Germany’; which we must all remember occurred AFTER Germany declared war on the United States”
Absolutely – and that tends to get overlooked or fudged. In fact, the historical facts are worse – the US Congress didn’t want to engage in a European war until Nazi Germany left no option by declaring war on America.
The is how the American historian William Shirer, author of: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, reported in chapter 25 the situation in Congress after Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941:
“My own impression in Washington at that moment was that it might be difficult for President Roosevelt to get Congress to declare war on Germany. There seemed to be a strong feeling in both Houses as well as in the Army and Navy that the country ought to concentrate its efforts on defeating Japan and not take on the additional burden of fighting Germany at the same time.”
Never mind that Britain had been engaged in a European war against Nazi Germany since 3 September 1939 and, following the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor, was facing also the prospect of Japan invading Hong Kong, Burma, Malay and even India.

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dsquared

May 23, 2007

[What next? Religious affiliations? Race?”
Ah. That would be the 2011 census]
well probably so, since these utterly standard questions have been on every census since the 1970s.
Tim adds: Remind me, please…the census is anonymous, isn’t it? So, the difference here is…?

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Bob B

May 23, 2007

All of which reminds me:
“The 2001 census reveals that 390,000 people across England and Wales are devoted followers of the Jedi faith made famous by the blockbuster films.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2757067.stm

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Kay Tie

May 23, 2007

“Tim adds: Remind me, please…the census is anonymous, isn’t it? So, the difference here is…?”
Err, no. The data is available to any hostile Government to open up and use when it likes (“if this data can be used to prevent just one terrorist incident then we owe it to.. blah blah blah”).
http://www.newstatesman.com/200705080005

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Jim

May 23, 2007

“you think it’s a good idea, one brimming with good liberal consequences, to create a database of those who are gay?”
You haven’t understood the story, have you? You seem to think this is about some compulsory register for gays. It isn’t – not even GMFA are suggesting that it is. What it is about is how information on sexual health is provided to gay men, and how that is funded. And while GMFA no doubt do some great work, they are definitely not neutral on this, since they are currently funded by health authorities to provide the said information. Are you starting to see why they might have an incentive to complain about any changes?
Unfortunately the Guardian story isn’t clear enough to tell us what changes are actually being proposed – because pretty much entirely based on what GMFA told them. It talks about surveyors getting the views of gay men on the scene and people diagnosed as HIV-positive being registered as such, neither of which seem particularly insane ideas to me.
But there’s silly old me applying reason to the subject again. Maybe I should just take a leaf out of your book and just yell the stupidest, crassest thing that comes into my head. Clearly you care more about making a big splash then you do about what’s actually true, and if making a big splash requires calling NHS workers Nazis for no apparent reason, then so be it. Maybe you should think about what that says about you.

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dsquared

May 24, 2007

[Remind me, please…the census is anonymous, isn’t it?]
errrr no; the clue is the box at the top with “Name:” written next to it. You can even search the 1901 census results online.
http://www.1901censusonline.com/
on the other hand I’m apparently wrong about religion, which was only introduced in 2001; I thought it had been around for ages, but 2001 was the first census for which I was head of a household.
Tim adds: I’ve never been in the UK at a census time so I didn’t know. Ah, yes, 2001….that’s when the Jedi campaign was running, wasn’t it?

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Wayne

May 31, 2007

I was part of the pubklic consultation on this that GMFA ran. the public were asked what they thought about the plans, including interviews on the scene and all the opther changes and the views of the public were ‘overwhelmingly hostile’. you can see all the documents for yourself and there’s no question people disagreed. not only to the database but the fact that people have to go through an interview in order to get health promotion. fat people don’t have to get interviewed to get information on low calorie diets! It’s the fact that this public consultation was ignored that worries me. The NHS think they can spend out money on hairbrained ideas that no one wants. An when the public say no, they just ignore it. Who do they think they are?

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